Comment of the Day: Phil: Groupishness TLDR, “Jubilation T. Cornpone” Edition: "The song 'The night they drove old Dixie down' is an interesting illustration... http://crookedtimber.org/2017/08/20/groupishness-tldr-jubilation-t-cornpone-edition/
...Celebrating that particular lost cause just seems toxic–and it’s not as if it’s hard to find reasons why it should seem that way. But in 1968(?) when Robbie Robertson read up on Stoneman’s cavalry and wrote the song–and in 1974 when Greil Marcus was writing his appreciation of the Band–most listeners had no problem identifying with poor old Virgil Caine and his people.... Why did the veiled and semi-veiled racism of the Lost Cause go down so easily, 50 years ago and less?...
Peter Viney: : The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down: "Jonathan Taplin (quoted by Robert Palmer)... http://theband.hiof.no/articles/dixie_viney.html
...It was May and they'd just finished it the night before. They said it'd come out fast and hard and clean. It was just the most moving experience I'd had for, God, I don't know how long. Because for me, being a Northern liberal kid who'd been involved in the Civil Rights movement and had a whole attitude towards the South, well I loved the music but I didn't understand where white Southerners were coming from. And to have it all in just three and a half minutes, the sense of dignity and place and tradition, all those things... Well, the next day after I'd recovered, I went to Robbie and asked him, "How did that come out of you?" And he just said that being with Levon so long in his life and being in that place at that time... It was so inside him that he wanted to write the song right at Levon, to let him know how much those things meant to him....
This was the track that came to be seen as most typical of The Band album. Levon sings the song in the persona of Virgil Caine, a Confederate ex-soldier who served on the Danville supply train until General Stoneman's Union cavalry troops tore up the tracks. The Richmond and Danville Rail Road was the main supply route into Petersburg where Lee's Army of Northern Virginia were holding their defensive line to protect Richmond. Stoneman was a pretty obscure character. You have to get into detailed histories of the Civil War to find him mentioned.
David Powell: "In the closing days of the war, Major General George Stoneman, as the commander of the East Tennessee district, oversaw a raid by a division of Union troops across the rugged Blue Ridge Mountians into northwest North Carolina and southwest Virginia. Their orders were not to fight battles but to punish and demoralize the Southern civilians. Stoneman, having previously served under General Sherman in the Georgia campaign, had learned Sherman's methods of "total war"—the concept of targeting civilian as well as military objectives in order to destroy the enemy's will to resist.
Stoneman's cavalry troops were still exacting revenge on the Southern civilians at the time that General Robert E. Lee was surrendering at Appomattox. Stoneman's forces plundered & destroyed tons of supplies, including foodstocks & grain, along with miles of railroad supply tracks. Even after the shooting war ended, they assisted in chasing down and capturing Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
After the war, Stoneman remained in the regular army until he retired in 1871 at the rank of Colonel. He moved to California and lived on a large estate called "Los Robles" near Los Angeles. As a Democrat, he held several public offices and was Governor of the state from 1883 to 1887. Stoneman died on September 5, 1894 in Buffalo, New York.
Even though Stoneman, on the surface, may appear to be just a footnote in the history of the Civil War, in that part of the U.S. where the borders of Tennessee, North Carolina & Virginia meet, his name lives in infamy. The exploits of his plundering cavalry troops in the last days of a defeated Confederacy are still a part of local legend. In this respect, I feel that Robbie Robertson succeeded in capturing this sentiment accurately in the song...
